To measure immunity you need to see who gets re-infected and how seriously. Of what I've seen, those studies either show no difference or an advantage for natural immunity.

I don't think the information that natural immunity might be better, is all that helpful. But the growing evidence that it is (at least) as good, is very relevant, since it means vaccines can be prioritized to those who have not yet had Covid-19.

And people who have had it, should certainly not be discriminated against in any way.

This is a blatant oversimplification & misrepresentation of the article you referenced, and the paper which it cites [1]. The paper makes no claims that vaccine induced immune responses are more or less superior than the immune response induced by natural infection.

Quote from [1]:

- "Specifically, antibodies elicited by the mRNA vaccine were more focused to the RBD compared to antibodies elicited by an infection, which more often targeted other portions of the spike protein."

Counterintuitively, this property of the current mRNA vaccines - the induction of an immune response highly targeted toward the spike protein RBD - when combined with compulsory mass vaccination, could result in widespread proliferation of vaccine resistant variants [2][3][4][5]. This is a serious concern that is on the radar of many top experts in the field.

The second and third order consequences of mass vaccination using an imperfect vaccine are anything but simple, and very much pose a public health risk.

When you consider the evidence supporting the fact that natural immunity is at least equally effective as vaccination (a few more supporting references here [6][7]), it becomes very difficult to defend the idea you're advocating:

> it's simple enough: pretty much everybody (over 12 until trials complete) should get vaccinated

[1] Antibodies elicited by mRNA-1273 vaccination bind more broadly to the receptor binding domain than do those from SARS-CoV-2 infection https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/13/600/eabi9915

[2] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

[3] SARS-CoV-2 immune evasion by the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant of concern https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/30/scie...

[4] mRNA vaccine-elicited antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and circulating variants https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03324-6

[5] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

[6] Necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected individuals https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...

[7] Antibody Responses 8 Months after Asymptomatic or Mild SARS-CoV-2 Infection https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7920668/

The health policy in some countries e.g. in France (and maybe large parts of Europe?) actually allow you to have an "health passport" just because you recovered from Covid recently enough.

It would actually be illegal in France to privately require proof of vaccination if not exceptionally allowed by a narrow law (as a general principle, medical information are very protected here).

Some Covid vaccines have been forbidden for people under a specific age limit, although they were allowed for a while, but the risk has eventually been reassessed after a few suspects side effects (very very rare, but considered a risk important enough to change the policy, esp since the risk of covid itself decrease greatly the younger you are, and there are arguably safer alternatives in other models of vaccines).

Of course it is still probably "on average" better to get vaccinated on top of recovering from Covid, and of course the comparison with amputation was probably over-the-top (at the very least it should have been stated as a risk of "amputation" with a very very low proba); but overly constraining people is debatable -- especially when tons of factor are hard to be synthetized to "everybody should just get vaccinated right now, unconditionally, -- and accept to be privately controlled by anybody -- or they are horrible antivax people and people will die because of them"; not everybody has the same amount of social contacts with the same categories of people and/or live in the same kind of city and accommodations, public health is not something that appears in empty social contexts just because of raw numbers and models, etc.

Yes it probably would be better if "everybody" was vaccinated. Willingly. And if we had decades of feedback to convince people. And if they were vaccinated against other diseases too. Now welcome to the real world and think of how to navigate efficiently with imperfect knowledge, including how to avoid entirely dismissing concerns.

Primum non nocere certainly does not to be dropped and hopefully will not: the situation is shitty but will become clearer with time, and if we detect either more risks or more safety for various vaccines hopefully the policies will evolve accordingly, and individual opinions too. Note that they already are not completely binary and that it is still kind of hard to decide from which age we should allow / incite / require vaccination -- and the "optimal" solution probably depends on the coverage of the rest of the population too.

And that's because of that very principle. There is no exact obvious point where all-in starts to be required. It maybe would be useful to make regular-flu shots more or less mandatory (and now even the interest of flu-shots is debated by serious scientists because it may be counter productive for the state of the immune system latter in life; or that may depend on people -- maybe new strains of covid would yield to similar debates in a few years?). They are typically not.

That being said my current understanding make me wish more people go get vaccinated, but just do not pretend it is all black & white and that people should not have subtle/reserved opinions.

Rejecting a medical intervention is a right people have. It doesn’t matter it’s because of 5G, fertility, medical conditions or them merely not being in the mood to take the vaccine.